Wednesday, February 25, 2009

"By that, I mean ‘0 to 9: The Complete Magazine’ is a book only in the sense that a book serves as portal. No, it would be more accurate to call it a point, a foci to move from – someway to mark a horizon outwards. The book as compass."

This coming from the Blog 'For The Birds' (http://imforthebirds.blogspot.com/2009/02/0-to-9-complete-magazine-1967-1969.html).

That chimes well with what I'm thinking about at the moment in terms of the status of the actual text, what a volume of poems is - or could be.

A movement through, a point of access, a bringing together with a view to sending the reader away ...

And is this - to go back to an old theme - what marks a key difference between poetries (U.S./U.K., experimental/traditional, etc.) . in other words how the very book is conceived? I'm thinking about Robert Duncan's and Jack Spicer's individual volumes, early Raworths, Iain Sinclairs ... . And that the shift into official publishing is - as such - a betrayal, a dilution? (And I see how the LRB are running an offer on a deluxe edition of the new Sinclair - there's an irony here?).